A primary school in Antrim was evacuated today after an eight-year-old pupil found a viable pipe-bomb in the playground.
The alert was raised St Comgall's primary school on the Ballymena Road after Brendan Shannon picked up the device in the playground and carried it into a classroom, where he handed it to a teacher.
Some 400 children at the school were moved to a nearby church and British army technical officers were called. A subsequent examination of the bomb confirmed it was a viable explosive device.
Meanwhile, a second primary school was evacuated on the Greystone Road in Antrim after a local media outlet received a telephone warning shortly after 10.30am.
Both alerts are now over.
Brendan and his twin sister, Ciara, had arrived early on their bicycles to help deliver milk to classrooms when he noticed the device lying on top of a painted line close to the playground wall. “I didn’t know what it was,” he said. “It was like a pipe with a screw and some wires were hanging out of it. Somebody told me afterwards it was a pipe bomb.”
Brendan’s mother Siobhán Shannon, a mother of three, said she was disgusted. “The people who left that device probably have kids of their own. Have they no conscience?" she asked. “It was a viable device and can you imagine what might have happened had he dropped it?"
The majority of the children at the school are Catholic, but pupils belonging to other religious denominations, including Protestant, also attend.
School principal Hilary Cush said he was outraged. “It’s absolutely crazy. It’s unbelievable that innocent children should be caught up in something like this.”
Police said the people responsible for the alerts were cowardly criminals.
"I cannot express enough my disgust at the cowards involved in these alerts today," PSNI Chief Inspector Simon Wall said. "It is by sheer good fortune that we are not dealing with a severely injured child right now. The people who carried out these senseless acts show a total disregard for their fellow man".